


The Only Mercy in the Vault

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [25]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Forced Pregnancy, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 04:48:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6785866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Furiosa is the immovable object. Angharad is the unstoppable force. Now, at the discovery of her third pregnancy, Angharad is a star on the verge of collapse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only Mercy in the Vault

Furiosa was not the only Imperator set to guard the Vault, but she was the only one allowed inside. She wasn’t ever sure if Joe kept them on an irregular schedule to disorient the Wives or their guard; either way it meant she might spent twenty days inside the Vault, then two days back with her crew, and another ten in the Vault, with no repeatable pattern she could find or rely on.  
Furiosa both hated and longed for her guard duty, despising the tumult of emotions she couldn’t afford to _have_ , let alone show another living being. But she was also more alive among the cautious, curious Wives than she was anywhere else in the Citadel. The last time she had had a chance to speak to Aurelio, she’d told him about the strange almost-friendships she was unable to avoid. Her daemon had sighed, ruffling his wings and resting his beak on her shoulder. She was out alone in the Wasteland, both more dangerous than going with a convoy and less so. Less chance of being spotted, more chance of getting overrun if you did. 

Furiosa was good at not getting spotted. 

Aurelio was perched on her shortened arm, pressing as much of his body against her as he could. And Furiosa couldn’t bear the fact that his weight felt strange on her arm, that his feathers against her skin were unsettling instead of comforting.

“It is good that they know you,” he said at last, his beak clicking at the end of each word. “And it’s good you know them. They will help you stay human.”

“And what can I do for them?” she asked, and he listened to the question underneath –– _What if I can’t_ be _human anymore?_

“You ground them.” He told her, without ever having met Angharad at her proudest, Dag at her strangest, Toast at her most stubborn. Furiosa almost smiled, thinking of the Wives as clouds, far away and above the bloody rock of the Citadel, and her the anchor holding them to the ground.

But of course the image couldn’t hold. There was blood, and plenty of it, in the Vault. The Wives might be far away from her daily life in the garages and the War Boys’ hungry deaths, but their own suffering was in its own way just as terrible. Furiosa just had the unique position of having experienced both hells in one lifetime. 

One hundred and twenty-three days after her reunion with Aurelio, Furiosa arrived at the Vault less than an hour after Joe had left it. She’d become adept at avoiding the regular visits of the Organic Mechanic, perhaps the only thing that happened regularly to the Wives. Furiosa went expecting a quiet Dag, a sullen Capable, a screaming Angharad.

Instead she walked into a silent Vault. Her skin prickling, her hand itching for the pistol Joe would never let her carry here, Furiosa came to a tense stand-still at the edge of the empty pool. The Dag’s vixen peered out of a curtained alcove, fox-red face blinking nervously to see who had come. When she spotted Furiosa, she disappeared back into the alcove without a word.

Miss Giddy’s raven flapped over to a railing opposite Furiosa’s fighting stance, beady eyes studying her closely. She was not ready to speak directly to another person’s daemon, but in the end Angharad spared her from having to.

Splendid stepped out of the tiny hallway that led to the Vault’s composting toilet, one hand dug into the fur of her daemon. The other, treacherous, was wrapped around a wide sliver of metal. Black iron gleamed under a wash of blood, and Angharad’s face was striped with it, brighter than Capable’s long hair. Several cuts on her forehead dripped clean lines down her face; more were scratched deep across her cheeks and arms. Furiosa had seen her cuts scabbed over and dark, in various stages of healing, until they faded to irreparable lines across her water-soft skin. But she’d never caught Angharad with blood still on her hand, never with a broken spike of iron sharp enough to cut a man’s throat.

It was her duty to take that defiance from her, to stem her wounds and get Organic to stitch them up before they could scar. Furiosa looked, and looked, and looked.

“I’m pregnant. Again.” Angharad rolled her head a little sideways, her voice as dry and despairing as the wind off Fury Road. And Furiosa didn’t move, her muscles tensed for a fight.

They were two immovable objects, staring, neither willing to back away, neither knowing what could possibly happen next. Quieter than usual, in the back of her mind Furiosa heard _you can’t trust them_ like the click-click of a loaded gun. 

Angharad was terribly beautiful, standing against the yellow stone with blood staining the uppermost edges of her white, white clothes. She stood loosely, facing Furiosa without the faintest hint of fear, her lioness staring with lovely amber eyes. And Furiosa knew that Joe had made a mistake, taking such awful beauty as a wife. Angharad was not like Furiosa –– she was not a survivor. She was the sandstorm that wiped out a city, she was the wildfire that burned a mountain clean. Angharad was going to escape, with or without Furiosa’s help. And she would die before she became what Furiosa was. For her, there was no going back, no compromise. Here was a woman who would die for her beliefs, and she scared Furiosa shitless.

Angharad nodded once and walked across to the spigot set into a back wall of the Vault, rinsing her improvised knife under the endless flow. Her lioness never looked away from Furiosa, but Angharad had dismissed her as thoroughly as if she’d turned invisible. 

Capable’s hare crept down the stairs of the loft, ears trembling in Furiosa’s direction. After all, she wasn’t one of them: she was an Imperator, their jailer, with a flaming skull at her hips instead of white linen. 

The silence was oppressive; Furiosa felt Joe’s ghost behind her, an inevitable punishment that wouldn’t touch the Wives but would leave her torn to pieces. “Angharad,” she said, her voice the steady growl of a well-tuned engine. “Give me the knife.” 

Splendid turned, straightened from her crouch, and looked again at Furiosa. Then, wordless still, she walked across the open floor and deposited her sharpened steel in the Imperator’s cold hand. “I am not his,” she said, loudly, every word the pounding of a war drum. “Furiosa.”

Furiosa curled metal fingers around the make-shift dagger, wondering how far away she could take it before Joe’s wrath no longer haunted her. 

“Furiosa,” Angharad repeated, and the guard looked at the prisoner as if their positions were reversed. “Neither are you.” Angharad stood with blood running freely down her face, and the only mercy Furiosa could offer was to turn away. She took up her post by the door, ignoring Capable, who came down to cradle her hare in one arm and hold Angharad with the other. When the Dag and Cheedo emerged from their hiding place, Toast followed. The lot of them crept away into their bedroom, Ms. Giddy’s raven herding them along. Furiosa listened to the stutter of words start up among them, and almost she wished she could retreat with them; to the lesson Ms. Giddy was unfolding, to the warmth of a shoulder to lean on, even the endless love of a daemon to pull close to you and never let go. Instead she moved to close the spigot, a distant part of her disgusted at the waste, and resumed her post, letting the lesson wash over her without touching it.


End file.
